Preserving My Sanity What’s cooking? Red and Yellow Cherry Tomato Confit

I spent 10 days in Italy, and all I got was this sinus infection. That’s not really true, but it is what’s most on my mind right now. So while I try to get my ears to unclog, and gather my thoughts for a couple of posts about the most foodie-friendly place on earth – that would be the Amalfi Coast – I have something for you to do with your spare time this weekend. You’re welcome.

It’s the end of the official tomato season, and what better way to hang onto it than to literally preserve some. I know, I’ve beat this horse till it’s probably long past dead in your minds, but in the middle of winter, when everything outside is gray and brown and white, you will thank your lucky stars that your good friend, The Kitchen Goddess, persuaded you to put some of these goodies away in jars.

Let me start by saying that this is sooooo easy, and yet the results will make you the envy of all your friends. I’ve checked my local Whole Foods, and it seems that those really sweet cherry tomatoes are still available. So whether or not you have a Whole Foods nearby, you can probably find both red and yellow cherry tomatoes in stock at your local grocer or farmers’ market; if not, go for just red or whatever color you can find. I like the mix of red and yellow just for the color. And while I’ve used rosemary as my herb of choice, that’s mostly because the stuff grows like cactus down here in Texas, so I’m always trimming back my rosemary bushes and just throwing the branches away. You could also go for fresh oregano or some combination of oregano, thyme, rosemary, French tarragon, dill, or basil.

Confit (pronounced “con-fee”) originally developed as a way to preserve meats, salting and seasoning them and cooking them for a long time in their own fat, then cooling and storing them in the fat. Nowadays, many fruits and veggies are made into confit by just cooking the hell out of them. In fact, Giada has an apple and onion confit that looks delicious, though I only just discovered it in the process of writing this post. Have to try that. And lemon confit, which is used as a seasoning, and in which the lemons are preserved for 1-3 months in salt, is a whole different animal, but well worth trying.

This cherry tomato confit is completely wonderful as a topping for bruschetta, and Melissa Clark, from whom I adapted this recipe, says she serves it over fresh ricotta with crusty bread. I most often serve it on pasta, though it would go equally well over polenta or quinoa or creamy risotto. Straight from the jar, it makes a bright, really flavorful topping. All you might want to add is some grated parmesan, but I could see stirring in some sautéed mushrooms or sliced Italian sausage. So make a big batch, preserve some in jars, and leave the rest for dinner this week. In fact, even without that whole processing-in-boiling-water business, if you put the confit in jars, it will last at least a month in the refrigerator.

Red and Yellow Cherry Tomato Confit
Adapted from Melissa Clark in The New York Times

1 pint red cherry tomatoes
1 pint yellow cherry tomatoes
3-4 large cloves garlic, minced
¼ cup olive oil
leaves from 3 6-inch stems of fresh rosemary (a scant ¼ cup)
¼ teaspoon Aleppo pepper (alternatively, a pinch of crushed red pepper)
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

Preheat oven to 375º. In a large bowl, with a wooden spoon, gently stir together the tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, and rosemary. Spread the mixture out evenly onto a sheet pan, and sprinkle with Aleppo pepper (or pepper flakes), kosher salt, and pepper. Bake 45-50 minutes, until the tomatoes start to look wrinkled. Shake the pan a couple of times during the baking to keep the tomatoes distributed in the oil.

If you’re not eating them immediately, store the tomatoes – along with the oil, garlic, and herbs –  in jars. Keeps one month in the refrigerator.

Summer’s Over but Salad Season Is Still Going Strong What’s cooking? Poppy Seed Dressing

It’s been a salad-y week for me. I’m in Texas getting ready to spend 10 days in Italy, so you may not hear from me for a while. And in an effort to shed a few of the pounds that will no doubt reappear over these coming 10 days, I’ve been experimenting with just about every combination of salad ingredients available. But I haven’t lost any weight in the process. It must have been the ice cream I had for dessert.

As the weather gets a bit cooler, there’s a resurgence of lovely types of greens that don’t really like the heat of August. And you can still find wonderful, fresh salad items like tomatoes and figs and blackberries. I read somewhere that a new type of sprout – from sunflower seeds – is the latest rage among professional chefs, so I pounced on that, too, when it showed up at my local Whole Foods.

Foodie Faves: The Cook's Thesaurus

Spend enough time cruising the internet, and you’ll invariably come across a source you hadn’t known existed. And so it is with today’s favorite. I found The Cook’s Thesaurus when I was making that delicious Fish Chowder I posted about recently. The recipe called for “strong fish stock, traditional fish stock, chicken stock or water (as a last resort).” Well, I didn’t have fish stock, strong or otherwise, and those of you who know me – and don’t you all know me by now? – know that I don’t do much “as a last resort.” I’m more likely to make a run to the grocery store at 11 o’clock at night because the right ingredient is...well, the right ingredient and I need it NOW.

So I had chicken stock; I also had bottled clam broth, which I thought would be good with the chicken stock. But I wanted at least one more vote in favor. I hunted around on the web, and up popped The Cook’s Thesaurus. There, in black and white, was the entry:

“fish stock  Substitutes: fish broth (less salty) OR equal parts chicken broth and water OR clam juice (saltier)”

Then as I poked around the site, I found a wealth of information on substitutes for almost anything you could mention. As well as tidbits about herbs and spices, condiments (listed by culinary culture), dairy products, and on and on. Clearly written, easy to understand, and with great photos.

It’s just chockablock with tidbits of culinary knowledge that I’ve “known” but never really gotten the specifics of – like the amount of garlic powder (⅛ teaspoon) that’s the equivalent of one garlic clove.

It tells you which herbs (like rosemary or sage or oregano) are equally good in the dried form as fresh, and which really need to be fresh (like chives or basil or dill). And here’s one I didn’t know (amazing, yes?): dill loses flavor when it’s heated, so wait till the last minute to add it to hot dishes.

Here’s a tasting of what you’ll learn on a visit:

■Freshly cut fruits or vegetables won’t darken if you put them in acidulated water – that’s water with a small amount of vinegar or lemon juice. The proportions are 1-2 tablespoons of lemon juice/vinegar to one quart of water. I knew the first part but not the proportions.

■Store cheese near the bottom of the refrigerator, where the temperature is relatively more stable. But don’t freeze it, as freezing ruins the flavor. [The Kitchen Goddess’s favorite cheese guy says to always remove cheese from the fridge a half hour before serving. Except for goat cheese, which needs only 5-10 minutes.]

■Does your recipe call for buttermilk? Make your own by adding a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to a cup of milk and let it stand for 10 minutes. Or you can use plain, low-fat yogurt. Or sour cream. Or a cup of milk mixed with 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar, and let stand 10 minutes.

■For breading meat or fish, if you’re out of breadcrumbs, try crushed cornflakes (or other cereal) or crushed crackers, or even crushed corn chips or pretzels.

■The recipe calls for striped bass, but you can’t find any. Try any of these: grouper, sea bass, tilefish, halibut, salmon (!) or blackfish.

■Elephant garlic – those giant heads that look like garlic but come in a mesh bag – are more closely related to leeks than garlic, and therefore milder than regular garlic. Use it to get the flavor of garlic but a less potent taste.

■Out of fresh parsley? Try substituting chervil or celery tops or cilantro. Frozen parsley is acceptable, and all are preferable to dried parsley, which has about the same flavor as yesterday’s newspaper. And FYI, Italian parsley is much more flavorful than curly parsley. [Needless to say, the Kitchen Goddess knew that, but I throw it into this piece to demonstrate the breadth of information available at the Cook’s Thesaurus.]

And here’s a real kicker which I plan to try soon: If you are sauteing food, you can substitute flat beer for the butter. (Three tablespoon of flat beer for every tablespoon of butter called for in the recipe.) Go figure.

Gimme a Break – Fast Food for Tax Time What’s cooking? Corn and Tomato Frittata

I’m working on my taxes. Yes, it’s September, but that’s how long it takes me to (a) get my butt in the chair with the necessary papers in hand; and (b) when the butt is in the chair to get the accounting done in lieu of another game of Spider Solitaire. Here’s another thing that happens:

I’m moving through my AmEx statements looking for records of business deductions and charitable donations, when my husband says he wants to use the dryer and can he take my laundry out of it. I want to get the permanent press shirts hung up quickly, so I leave my desk, coffee cup in hand, and go to the laundry room, where I start hanging up shirts and folding clothes. Halfway through, I notice that the coffee cup is empty, so I go to the kitchen to refill.

Foodie Faves: Candles

I love candles. I can’t think of anything that makes a meal more special than candlelight. If you are having a PB&J by yourself for dinner, and you set a couple of candles out on the table where you’ll be eating – even if it’s only the kitchen island – the meal will be more pleasant and you will feel better about yourself. So before the entertaining season rolls in, I thought I would, er, wax eloquent on the subject.

When my sons were living at home, I almost always lit candles at the dinner table. I believed that they helped to create a mood that was friendly and warm – that they made the meal feel like a special time. The glow of candlelight brings on a mood that is quieter and more intimate; and in a house with as much testosterone as we had, lowering the volume of discourse is no mean feat.

Curse of the Nightowl What’s cooking? New Jersey Fish Chowder

We spent most of last summer trying to remember on a daily basis to pick up a copy of The New York Times. It had seemed too complicated to try getting one subscription in Texas and another in New Jersey. Besides, the minimart in our NJ building sold papers, so all we had to do was remember.

This summer, remembering how hard that remembering part had been, I bit the bullet and opened a new account in Jersey City, under my husband’s name. Delivery went swimmingly until we popped down to Texas for a week, and when we got back, suddenly we were getting two copies of the paper every day.

Foodie Faves: Salad Savvy What’s cooking? Parsley Shallot Vinaigrette

My husband and I almost came to blows over making the salad the other night. He insisted he was only tearing the lettuce because I had forbid him to cut it with a knife. But his method of tearing was to grasp several leaves at once and rip them apart with the same sort of action you’d use to take the head off a chicken. The Arnold Schwarzenegger school of salad making.

Now, I’ll admit to a certain degree of...umm...high-handedness when it comes to kitchen techniques, and my technique is to tear the lettuce into slightly-larger-than-bite-sized pieces, one leaf at a time. Takes me forever, but it looks great. I know, I know, it’s a miracle that he wants to help at all when the Kitchen Goddess is at the helm. But let’s not kid ourselves – when you’ve been in charge of the meals for 35 years, you develop certain – shall we say preferences? – about preparing the food.

Preserving Summer What’s cooking? Lemony Fig Preserves

“This is the last week of the peaches, ma’am.” That’s what the guy at the farmers’ market said yesterday morning, sending me into yet another fury of fruit-buying. “So I’ll take an extra box of them,” I said. Then I rushed over to the other good fruit stand and bought four boxes of purple plums. At the counter, I noticed really good looking dark figs, and grabbed three boxes of those. And just as I was about to break free, I saw that they also had those big, tart red-orange plums. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with these,” I said, “but give me a couple of pounds.”

As September comes rushing toward us, I’m scrambling to develop culinary souvenirs of the summer. In addition to a precious batch of bright sugar plum soup, I’ve frozen a quart of mellow, slightly sweet corn soup. Then there are the desserts – with berries no longer in season, I’ve been making sorbets from every melon that’s rolled my way.

Possessed! What’s cooking? Raspberry Chocolate Almond Spread

I really think I must have been possessed at the farmers’ market this week. The weather had cooled off – the morning temperature was about 66 degrees when I got out of my car at 8:00 a.m. I was maybe the first person at the market when it opened.

I’m not normally an early morning person. Late night is when I shine. But here in New Jersey, my husband and I are dealing with the one-car phenomenon, because parking in Jersey City is completely ridiculous. The main streets in our neighborhood have parking only on one side of the street, and then only if you have a “Zone 1” permit. (We do not.) You can park in front of our building, but the number of spaces available is very small versus the number of folks living in the building, and the fight for those spaces isn’t pretty. So when we bought the apartment, we made sure to get a place that came with a slot in the garage. But that’s only one.

Foodie Faves: Julia’s New App

She makes it look so easy. Julia, that is. In my last post, I mentioned her new app, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which has just been released by Random House Digital (owner of Knopf, her publisher) in celebration of the 100th anniversary of her birth. And while I’d have paid $2.99 just for the treat of watching Julia in action again, I must tell you that it’s about the best value I’ve gotten for that amount in recent memory. By the way, the brief on this app at the iTunes Store says the $2.99 is a special introductory price through the end of August.

For starters, I love that it’s more about technique than straight-out recipes, although the techniques all relate to at least one recipe from the book (MAFC). There are the 30 video clips starring Julia, as she demonstrates how to poach an egg or make hollandaise sauce or truss a chicken. (I can’t decide if these were from her TV series or if she did them separately for some other commercial purpose – she wears the same clothes in all the ones I’ve watched. Hmmm.) In fact, she makes it look so easy that I’m encouraged to try many of these things myself. A confession: I recently poached my first egg ever. Really. And while the look of it wasn’t perfect, I plan to spend some time watching Julia to see if I can’t improve.

So it’s a fun app, and particularly instructional for those of us who learn better from watching than from reading. You only get 32 recipes, but she gives you variations on many of them that expand the range of possibilities.

Other nice features include a grocery list you can edit and email to yourself; good color photos of the finished dishes; and a remarkable page of “Other Information” that includes a glossary of cooking terms, a discussion of kitchen equipment, an illustrated how-to on knife skills, and an extensive treatise  – with recipes, separate from the featured recipes – on stocks.

You’ll even learn how to pronounce “bouillabaisse.”